Turin Shroud: Believers hit back in almighty row over whether famous piece of cloth really did contain Jesus' body

This, it has to be said, was not your normal kind of press conference.

We gathered in Hampshire to discuss a piece of linen in Italy, with some of the key evidence for the Turin Shroud’s authenticity as a Catholic relic being presented by a Jewish expert to an audience of Muslims.

No wonder things seemed confusing at times.

But if you listened carefully to the shroud researching “sindonologists” addressing the Jalsa Salana convention for Ahmadiyya Muslims near Alton, Hampshire, you could learn a thing or two about “pseudoscience”, blood stains and the naughty things you can do with a plastic mannequin.

For make no mistake, these sindonologists were convinced that what two other researchers had recently done with a plastic mannequin had, scientifically speaking at least, been very naughty indeed.

Dr Matteo Borrini of Liverpool John Moores University and Luigi Garlaschelli of the University of Pavia had used said mannequin, a living volunteer and real and synthetic blood to investigate stains on the Turin Shroud to see whether it really could have wrapped the crucified body of Jesus.

Their conclusion, as reported by most news outlets including The Independent, was that apparent blood spatters on the shroud could only have been produced by someone moving to adopt different poses – rather than lying still, in the manner of a dead and yet to be resurrected Messiah.

Which, as also reported by The Independent, did tend to support the conclusion that the much-venerated piece of cloth in Turin Cathedral was not the burial shroud of the Messiah, but a clever Medieval forgery.

Hence, once they had read The Independent’s report, the exquisitely polite invitation of the Ahmadiyya Muslims to come to their annual convention in Hampshire and be told different.

The Ahmadiyya Muslims, at least from a Christian and mainstream Islamic perspective, like to do things differently. For them, the shroud is venerated as potential proof not of Jesus’ death on the cross, but of the fact that he was taken down from it alive.

This conflicts with mainstream Islamic belief and partly explains why the Ahmadiyya are now headquartered in the UK after allegedly facing persecution in Muslim countries including Pakistan, where they began in the 19th Century.

And of course, even if the Ahmadiyya revere Jesus as a noble prophet, their never-dead theory does rather contradict the Christian beliefs of millions who regard the shroud as a relic of the resurrection.

But here we are at a Catholic-organised travelling Turin Shroud exhibition within a Muslim convention in Hampshire, being told a thing or two by a Jewish photographer.

Barrie Schwortz, 72, was the official documentarial photographer on the 1978 Shroud of Turin Research Project, (Sturp), which conducted the first ever scientific examination of the piece of cloth in Turin Cathedral.

He began as a sceptic, but came to believe that when examined with specialised equipment, the shroud exhibited three-dimensional properties that could not be replicated in photographs or, more importantly, in painted Medieval forgeries.

And so now, the friendly, pony-tailed Mr Schwortz is talking in most unflattering terms about what those two scientists did with their mannequin.

“What do I think of their conclusions?” says Barry Schwortz. “Think of my initials. They used a plastic mannequin. Do you think that would duplicate the effects of a man who has been scourged and crucified?”

“These guys are totally out to lunch,” he adds. “They totally ignored all the vast array of published science that proved them wrong.”

Between them, says Mr Schwortz, he and the three other sindologists who have come to Hampshire have 200 years’ experience of studying the shroud directly.

“Compare and contrast that with some media attention to a couple of researchers who took a plastic mannequin and did some very poorly conducted experiments and claimed the shroud was a fake.”

In other words: who are the pseudoscientists here? The two guys from two different universities, or the sindonologists?

“They’re the pseudoscientists!” says Mr Schwortz. “Look at the credentials of the people who were on the Sturp team with me.

“We had chemists, physicists … Don Lynn was head of imaging for Nasa’s Voyager, Viking, Mariner and Galileo projects. And then look at these guys’ credentials …”

To Mr Schwortz, that fact that Garlaschelli is also affiliated to the Italian Committee for the Investigation of Claims of the Pseudosciences merely condemns him as hopelessly biased.

“He is an out and out sceptic! He’s paid to be a sceptic by atheists.”

As for Dr Borrini: “It’s kind of astounding for a man who is a Catholic to deny [the authenticity of the Turin Shroud] on such weak claims.”

It is a theme repeated with gusto by his fellow sindonologist Emanuela Marinelli, 67, a retired high school geography teacher with two degrees who takes the title professor by virtue of the Italian custom of giving the honorific to schoolteachers.

“What is really disturbing,” says Prof Marinelli. “Is that hardly any media attention is paid to all the stuff about the shroud in peer-reviewed journals, and then this stupid experiment [with the blood and the mannequin] … big, big publicity!”

She provides an analysis of the blood patterns on the shroud that is rather different from that offered by Garlaschelli and Borrini.

Of course the two rivulets around the hand bled differently, explains Prof Marinelli, a Catholic. One was formed when Christ was in a horizontal position on the ground, shortly after nails were hammered through his wrists. The second rivulet was formed as the cross was raised into a vertical position so Jesus could be crucified. Simple.

“And yet Garlaschelli and Borrini are surprised the blood flowed from the wrist in two different directions!”

She is equally forthright when The Independent reminds her that in 1989 carbon dating produced what was described as “conclusive evidence” that the shroud was medieval not Biblical – along with the withering assertion of Oxford University’s Professor Edward Hall: “Some people may continue to fight for the authenticity of the shroud, like the Flat Earth Society, but this settles it all as far as we are concerned."

Now, however, Professor Marinelli is equally withering in asserting that it was the carbon dating, not the belief in the shroud that was flawed.

She cites the work of Harry Grove “a man who was an unbeliever, who was convinced the shroud was fake” but who in 1997 first raised the possibility that the shroud might have been contaminated by bacteria and fungi that produced a false carbon dating result.

“Unfortunately the carbon dating team took a corner of the shroud that was polluted and had been touched by pilgrims,” says Prof Marinelli. “You could see that the colour of the corner was darker than the rest of the shroud.

“The cleaning systems the laboratories used couldn’t exclude pollution from fungi and bacteria.”

Other scientists, it is fair to say, beg to differ. They also contest another sindonologist argument, that the carbon daters tested a corner of shroud that had been repaired with cotton by 16th Century nuns.

The sceptics say that testing a mixture of 16th Century and first Century elements would have got a carbon dating reading of around the 7th Century – still much earlier than the actual results that suggested a date range of 1260-1390.

But Prof Marinelli says you also have to factor in the fungi and bacteria effect – and, she insists, once you combine that with the work of 16th Century nuns, a genuine Biblical shroud is incorrectly dated to the medieval era.

Scientific tests, she suggests, can be scientific, but wrong.

“A blood test is also scientific,” says Prof Marinelli with a smile. “But if you test your blood after you’ve just eaten a cake, the glucose reading is going to be wrong, isn’t it?”

And apparently there is more trouble with the plastic mannequin and the fake blood.

Sindonologist number three Bruno Barberis has another counter-argument.

“They used blood that was very, very fluid, that would have flowed with very high velocity,” he says. “But the man in the shroud would have been suffering from the effects of heat and dehydration. His blood would have been very viscous. It would have flowed much more slowly.”

And so, 628 years after Catholic Bishop Pierre d’Arcis declared the Turin Shroud a fake, the debate rumbles on, and on.

Mr Barberis is the former director of the International Sindonology Centre, but in his day job he is a professor of mathematical physics researching theoretical cosmology at the University of Turin.

He grins: “This is the beautiful thing in the history of science: in any field you find people coming to different conclusions and the amazing thing is to try to work out who has the correct answer.”

However much the sceptics may wish it otherwise, the Turin Shroud is probably going to be providing a lot of ‘beautiful amazement’ for a good while yet.